Why Can’t Someone Nice and New York-y Run for Senate, Like I Dunno Rosie Perez?

Far be it from me to call it disingenuous when a person moves from Tennessee to New York and becomes more liberal as a result. This happens all the time, as documented in Woody Allen’s engrossing nonfiction film Whatever Works. But seriously, Harold Ford?

More galling than his still-got-that-new-convictions-smell positions on social issues—which as they were in Tennessee are so blatantly triangulated as to be almost funny—is the stuff that hasn’t changed, such as the fact that this Merrill Lynch executive is mostly just a resident of the world of well-connected rich people, who move around wherever with no particular ties to anywhere, and has positions to match: corporate tax breaks and no concern over executive pay (which, Harold, is not actually tied to performance at all!).

Now yes, the Senate is a national office in the way that the House isn’t, and yes New York has a grand tradition of exemplary carpetbagger Senators. But this guy. He works in the financial sector, lives in the East 20s, takes cabs everywhere and doesn’t go to the outer boros—if this person was a high school classmate of yours, you’d dismiss him as a 30-and-out.